


A Name

by flight815kitsune



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 11:22:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3766294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flight815kitsune/pseuds/flight815kitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steven Grant Rogers.</p><p>The name had been on Bucky’s wrist for as long as he could remember.</p><p>Seeing the scrawny kid refuse to back down from a fight and then hearing the teacher call his name for roll call had been a revelation. Matching the swollen cheek and defiant glare to the scrawl, he knew that he would stand by Steve’s side until the world stopped spinning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Name

Steven Grant Rogers.

The name had been on Bucky’s wrist for as long as he could remember.

Seeing the scrawny kid refuse to back down from a fight and then hearing the teacher call his name for roll call had been a revelation. Matching the swollen cheek and defiant glare to the scrawl, he knew that he would stand by Steve’s side until the world stopped spinning.

The name on Steve’s wrist was in another language. Wasn’t the weirdest thing. it happened.

And the fact that he and Bucky didn’t match was fine. Just because he and Buck were one kind of soulmate, that didn’t mean that there wasn’t another person he was meant to be with. There are lots of kinds of love, after all.  

-

The target had a name.

The name on the target was the name of the next target.

-

Everyone had a name. It didn’t matter if they were target or handler or civilian best left ignored. The people he was exposed to always had a name.

He was not a person.

-

The man on the bridge asked him a question. Asked him who he was. He does not get asked anything. He receives orders. He does not have a name.

He knew him.

-

His shoulder was out of the socket. The target refused to kill him. The target refused to die. The target had given him a name.

He left the target beside the river.

He knew him.

-

The man with his face didn’t wear it the way he did, not in any of the pictures.

-

His arm hadn’t always been like this. It hadn’t always been shining steel. Once, what seemed like a very long time ago- it had been flesh and blood and bone.

It had had dark-smudged words across the wrist just like everyone else.

He forgets, sometimes.

-

He was greeted with an embrace. Not gunfire.

The former target smiled as though he was the first sunny day after a long winter.

-

Things were calm in the mornings, when they both tried to ignore the night that had preceded it. Insomnia and nightmares could be ignored in the light of day. Steve had caught him staring at a metal wrist.

“You used to have my name, right there.” Steve offered the words as though he wasn’t sure they’d be processed. Sometimes the things he said weren’t. It wasn’t anything personal. Some days he really wasn’t the person he was right now. He was grey, empty, somewhere outside. He was a weapon, useless without someone to use it. Weapons didn’t make small talk.

He was not a weapon, today.

He still didn’t know what to say.

Sometimes he missed having his mouth covered. He was never expected to answer when it was.

-

It had occurred to him to cover the bare spot the same way that Steve did. The same way that a lot of people did. Something simple. A plain band to keep the blank space hidden. It seemed wrong. Not everyone covered thiers, now. Besides, why should he hide nothing?

-

It isn’t until weeks later when he has fitted into Steve's life so perfectly that he has to wonder what kind of gap had been there before that he builds up the courage to ask.

“We weren’t a matched set?”

It was public knowledge in the years after his death among those women that he had taken to bed that he had had Captain America’s name there. There was nothing claiming the reverse was true.

“No. No we weren’t.”

-

Sometimes, she came over. She whispered in another tongue, one that felt both more and less familiar, offering understanding but never a single ounce of pity.

She never stayed for long. She didn’t have to when she knew exactly what to say.

-

Someone at one of the meetings with Sam had seen the metal and had told him he could just get it put back on, that just because he couldn’t see it now didn’t make it any less real. They rolled up their sleeve to show off a name scratched into plastic.

-

He stared at the band around Steve’s wrist. “Did you ever find them?”

“Haven’t looked. It seems late for that.”

“I’m sure if you’d bat your eyelashes, they’d forgive you in a heartbeat.”

Steve’s shoulder bumped his, but he didn’t argue.

-

Steve thought they were having sex.

He wasn’t even sure he was wired like that, not anymore. Sometimes, there was a spark of... something with Natasha. Something like unfinished business, but he didn’t want her the way he had wanted women before. That much he knew. He didn’t long for rucked-up skirts and panted declarations. He didn’t want soft kisses or gentle touches. He just wanted her there. Not with the bone-deep sense of belonging he felt around Steve (he could not tell when exactly that had begun), more like the two of them could take on the world and win and she would watch his back even when he forgot to. With Steve, he didn’t need to take on the world, because as long as Steve was part of it it couldn’t be that bad of a place.

-

He was more likely to see Steve’s dick than his wrist, and there was something wrong with that.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it before. He knew he had. At least once, because he would have held his up and Steve would have done the same. Probably more than once, considering how close they were- how close they had to be for Steve to still stand beside him even after all that had happened.

-

Steve painted the name back on. A steady hand and a fine brush signed a name that had always belonged there in bright red on steel. Most of the time he doesn’t even think about it, doesn’t even remember that it’s there. He didn’t need the words to confirm something that was so incredibly obvious that he . But he caught Steve glancing at it with the barest hint of a smile. A few small lines was a cheap price for that.  

-

The joke that he cracked was something that would have never passed his lips if he was the man who Steve thought he was. Steve laughed anyway.

He knows it’s not the same as it was before, but it’s still good.

-

Tony never covered his, even though it wasn’t Virginia Potts written there in a professional hand.

Neither did Professor X, even though his read Erik Lehnsherr.

-

Magical hoodoo from someone who clearly had no idea that even a Steve with no idea who Captain America was would never back down in a fight.

Steve had kneed him in the crotch and then headbutted the guy, which almost made up for it.

It took multiple Avengers knowing his name to even get him to let himself get checked out.

He didn’t know his team, didn’t even know what the hell the year was. If they hadn’t promised his presence, he had no doubt that they would have been looking for an amnesiac supersoldier in Brooklyn.

 

-

He hated being in a Shield facility. Far too many of them had been Hydra facilities and he could read their past in the interior design.

A resident expert on all things supernatural says that it’ll wear off in the next couple of days.

“What happened?”

“A lot of stuff. But the current issue  was you being too stupid to back away from the dude in the cape.” It was as good of an answer as any. Technically correct, but vague.

They let Steve come home.

-

“You look old, Buck.”

“Good for my age.”

“Do I look that old?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes you look worse than me, most of the time you look better”

“I always look better. “

“Punk.”

-

Steve had discarded the band at some point. He never stood still quite long enough to read it, though.

-

“Is this permanent?” Steve was staring at his physique in the mirror.

“So far.”

-

A slightly confused Steve woke up on the couch. Avengers see a lot, and he handled the news pretty well.

Apparently Someone else on the team had been turned into a frog at some point.

-

He managed to read it when Steve handed him breakfast. Well, managed implied that he had been attempting to in the first place. After his initial curiosity, it hadn’t mattered.

He read it when Steve  handed him breakfast.

In perfect typeface, as clean as it had ever been on Hydra paperwork, was his name. One of them, anyway.  

He had been given a number of different names.

He was breathing faster than he had to. Of all the things he had been expecting, he hadn’t even thought of this.

Steve caught him staring.

“Buck?” He used his brainwashed-assassin-in-my-presence voice. It was the kind of voice people used on spooked horses.

He opened his mouth, but the words weren’t there yet.

Steve was always meant to be there for him. Him. This was always meant to be.

“Buck?”

“We match now.” He wasn’t Bucky Barnes anymore, even if Steve thought otherwise. But they shared a body, some memories, and apparently a soulmate. But no matter how much had happened to him, Steve was still Steve. It was a wonder that more people didn’t have Captain America’s name emblazoned across their wrists. He held it up like he must have, a very long time ago. Steve read his name, and held his up in turn. The sounds of it felt right in his mouth, just like they sometimes did in talks with Natasha, and this was what it was supposed to feel like, like nothing changed at all and had just come into better focus.


End file.
